It’s here…!!! After 15 years of reviewing cookbooks in print and radio (and 1 frantic month learning all about podcasting), may I present to you my weekly all-cookbooks all-the-time podcast, The Level Teaspoon. You can find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and others.

Is it informative? Is it authoritative? You’ll have to judge. But I promise you won’t find a more irreverent cookbook review podcast anywhere.

WARNING: Listening when hungry may make cause you to eat way sooner than you meant to. Show notes follow.

Guest: Mark Lattanzi works by day at 93.9 WRSI, a popular local radio station here western Massachusetts. The rest of the time, Mark and his wife Cindy grow, make, and experiment with a ridiculous amount of food, much of which has been enthusiastically eaten by me.

Welcome, NPR listeners, chowhounds and recipe hunters Whether you’re here because you’ve just run across the “Best Cookbooks of 2015” feature at NPR.org or because you heard there’s a “Best Recipes of 2015” countdown going on, you’ve come to the right place.

Every year brings a plethora of fascinating new titles that are equally notable in one way or another. Although I can’t, of course, fully test and feature every one, what follows is my shortlist of titles I thought worth a second look.

Most Intriguing First Book from a Cute & Cosmopolitan Baking BloggerBaklava to Tarte Tatin, by Bernard Laurance

For Cooks Who Utterly Repudiate the ‘Quick & Easy’Slow Fires, by Justin Smillie

This Year’s Most Authentic Book Written By a SupermodelTrue Thai, by Hong Thaimee

Welcome, NPR listeners, chowhounds and recipe hunters, and newcomers to my blog! Whether you’re here because you’ve just heard the NPR cookbooks segment on your local public radio affiliate or because you heard there’s a “Best Recipes of 2014” countdown going on, you’ve come to the right place.

Here’s a quick and dirty rundown in case you just want to check out the list:[Please note that I’m taking a leaf out of Stephen Colbert’s book this month to show solidarity with those publishers struggling with Amazon’s monopolistic recent moves: This summer roundup list features Powell’s affiliate links instead of Amazon links. Powell’s has excellent prices, fantastic customer service, and ethical business practices, so shop with confidence.]

Mostly, my work for NPR can be found in the mouthwatering weekly Kitchen Window series. But yesterday, after collaborating with the terrific NPR books team, I released a story for another NPR series I love, ” Three Books”. It’s not my first; I did one some years ago on “stone soup” books – books on cooking with bare-bones ingredients during lean times.

This one is kind of the opposite. They’re “let them eat cake” books that are so frivolous that I’ve always felt actually making something out of them is strictly optional – cakes like Colette Peters’ magnificent trompe l’oeil stack of cushions, pictured at right.

It’s not that lean times have deserted us – far from it. But even in lean times, you still have to feed your imagination, too, don’t you?

Well, the list has gone live! After about 4 weeks of reading, browsing, asking the 7 questions, and recipe-testing (ask my family), my top 10 choices for summer cookbooks are now public. Read the story on the NPR website.

Following the top 10 is my own shortlist, which includes all the outstanding cookbooks that didn’t make it into the NPR article–lots of terrific choices for newlyweds, new college graduates, parents, and, well, everybody.

Happy New Year, cookbook lovers! I’m still coming up to speed, very slowly, after a week of festivities and sleeping-off-of-festivities.

I tested this book quite a while ago, in the fall. But as is so often the case, the review got pushed down the queue because other cookbooks of more immediate interest kept arriving, and then there was the holiday roundup season, etc. etc.

There isn’t a seafood cookbook published today that doesn’t have the word “sustainable” right up front…I guess the message is that if you’re going to make a withdrawal from the world’s dwindling supply of fish, you ought to do it as responsibly–and deliciously–as you can.

Although there are many cookbooks and many cookbook authors I admire, not all of them fit equally easily with my family-of-four dinner routine. Melissa Clark’s books are the exception. Reviewing Cook This Now was a boon for the household–a week of exceptional-tasting but easy-to-cook weeknight dinners I’d be making again and again, if I weren’t forever moving on to the next cookbook…